VB4 & CMS Migration

Good Afternoon,

I'm currently entertaining the idea of migrating away from vb4 CMS. My biggest challenge appears to be, since I was one of the few that *actually* used the CMS for articles and content somewhat regularly and had it play an important role in my site, I'm kind of at a loss for an upgrade path.

My forum is the dominant arm of my site, but the article portion is very important and going forward I hope to be about 50/50 CMS / Forum ratio. My articles are very photo heavy, having galleries in them, multiple pages (Something that was a great feature in VB4 Suite, if it would have ever worked properly). I want to end up with something that is almost like a web magazine for the CMS. Normal and easy word formatting, formatting/resizing of pictures, insertion of galleries, etc are my main points. I will be willing to sacrifice some on the forum side if I can get this stuff. A lot of the things in vb is bloat no one uses anyways.

In addition to that, my user base ended up making *very* good use of the Groups, something which I have not seen done on very many other sites. I have a total of 24 Groups, which act as a niche within a niche on my site, and they range from 500~ members and 5,000 posts in size on down to just a hand full. So I have that to deal with as well.

There is also users photo galleries, thats got quite a bit of use and I would hate to see just lost. A lot of big trips and things that were documented that way, several hundred photos at a time, etc. Its very sad that the development of vb4 suite didn't go further than it has - it had so much potential, all the ingredients were there.

Based on the little, tiny bit of research I've done so far, I'm considering something like Wordpress for the CMS, with a SSO addon for Xenforo. However, I am very much looking for an open to alternatives that will allow me to salvage and keep as much of this content usable as possible.


Thanks for your advice and direction in advance.

Thanks,
-Billy
 
If you can move your articles into VB threads, you could then import them into this addon
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/xenzine-articles.1979/

There is a groups addon with a VB importer
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/social-groups-by-waindigo.891/

For a photo gallery, you must take a look at this one.
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/xen-media-gallery-user-albums-photos-videos-importers.1750/

Here is a Xenforo Worpress that you may want to look into
xenforo.com/community/threads/yet-another-wordpress-bridge-calling-for-testers.66935/
 
Thank you for the reply - I am definitely investigating and checking these out, looks like there are a lot more options to import and do what I wanted than I had really known. Things have matured a lot. I wish a bit more of it was first party features from an upgrade path stand-point, but the mod community seems to be thriving.

If anyone else has any other input in addition, definitely open to it.
 
Just a short update - I ended up using Jake's "old" vb4 Importer, and it seems to have gotten most of the meat and potatoes converted over but did run into a few snags. I chose it because the official importer did not support many things like existing CMS articles, groups, etc. Not importing CMS articles was a 100% fail, I have to have those.

Actually making use of my CMS Articles it imported at the moment is a bit of a challenge, it appears that when it imports the CMS Articles from VB4 and converts them into threads, it leaves a few fields ambiguous, and then XenZine has a problem processing them into articles. I'm working with the mod creator to try and resolve this, and I've posted a little snippet in the vb4 Importer discussion area also.

Making use of the imported groups data has not been started.


Overall - I am making process, but this sure is not as smooth and seamless transition as I maybe felt like it could be. Substantial investment in time trying to figure out what to do with the data once its imported.

Also, anything that had tables in it is Adios on the formatting
 
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